Quotes About Ethics

If we aren't willing to pay a price for our values, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all.

Westerners are fond of the saying 'Life isn't fair.' Then, they end in snide triumphant: 'So get used to it!' What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in! What a terrible, patriarchal response to a child's budding sense of ethics. Announce to an Iroquois, 'Life isn't fair,' and her response will be: 'Then make it fair!

Westerners are fond of the saying 'Life isn't fair.' Then, they end in snide triumph: 'So get used to it!' What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in! What a terrible, patriarchal response to a child's budding sense of ethics. Announce to an Iroquois, 'Life isn't fair,' and her response will be: 'Then make it fair!

We can protect life, practice generosity, behave responsibly, and consume mindfully.

One with compassion is kind even when angry; one without compassion will kill even as he smiles. SHABKAR, TIBETAN POET

A moral person is one who constantly exercises, and acts on, his best rational judgment.

Metaphysics—objective reality; Epistemology—reason; Ethics—self-interest; Politics—capitalism.

When my friend Matilda lay dying of Lou Gehrig's disease, she said that she had been prepared all of her life to choose between good and evil. What no one had prepared her for, she lamented, was to choose between the good, the better, and the best—and yet this capacity turned out to be the one she most needed as she watched the sands of her life run out.

Whatever I decided to do for a living, it was not what I did but how I did it that mattered.

As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God. In the words of Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas, "People of the Book risk putting the book above people.

The basic principle is to do no harm. Beyond that, you are free to do quite a lot of things for a living, but they are not all going to come with their own evident purposes. Supplying that purpose is going to be up to you.

about that too, ma'am," he said, writing up her citation, "but what made

Integrity isn't something you have in some parts of your life and not in others. You either have it or you don't.

Everyone in the world is guilty of something.

Yes, they manage to sound very reasonable to themselves as they talk of deterring others from crime; but the act of putting a man in jail remains essentially the act of trying to wish that man out of existence. From the moment of arrest one begins to feel against one's flesh the operation of this crude attempt at sorcery.

Yes. I think the anti-Wal-Mart is Costco, which pays much better and has much better health benefits and which is profitable and offers low prices.

From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of 8,000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.

I was raised the old-fashioned way, with a stern set of moral principles: Never lie, cheat, steal or knowingly spread a venereal disease. Never speed up to hit a pedestrian or, or course, stop to kick a pedestrian who has already been hit. From which it followed, of course, that one would never ever -- on pain of deletion from dozens of Christmas card lists across the country -- vote Republican.

Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.

We call ourselves public servants but I'll tell you this: we as public servants must set an example for the rest of the nation. It is hypocritical for the public official to admonish and exhort the people to uphold the common good.

More is required of public officials than slogans and handshakes and press releases. More is required. We must hold ourselves strictly accountable. We must provide the people with a vision of the future.

If the society today allows wrongs to go unchallenged, the impression is created that those wrongs have the approval of the majority.

Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.